


It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

by Bluewolf458



Category: The Sentinel (TV)
Genre: Gen, Sentinel Thursday
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-05
Updated: 2019-03-05
Packaged: 2019-11-09 08:39:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 319
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17998562
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bluewolf458/pseuds/Bluewolf458
Summary: Blair is considering old book titles





	It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Sentinel Thursday prompt dark

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

by Bluewolf

Some novels written in the late nineteenth and early part of the twentieth century showed a degree of what modern readers would call racism. Though there were exceptions.

Blair had first encountered books like Sanders of the River and King Solomon's Mines when he was just entering his teens, and, even at that age, considered those books said something - well, important - about the writers, who showed Africans as more than primitive servant-mentality savages, which was how they were depicted by a lot of writers of that era.

It was in part those books that had aroused in him an interest in anthropology.

But from them he had begun to realize that the era in which a book was written could be identified from its wording.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Blair shook his head. Often cited as a perfect example of bad writing, it had also been acclaimed at least once as a very good example of an opening line.*

It was simply a seven-word description of - well, a dark, moonless night with a storm raging. Succinct. In its own way, effective.

Okay, those seven words had led to a typical Victorian novel of the kind modern readers considered thoroughly over-written, but it was a product of its era. But he was quite sure that he could write something far more readable that began with those words.

And with that in mind...

It could make for an interesting lecture on the way cultures changed. And then he would set his sophomore class a challenge - to write a... not a paper, just a short story, maybe with a maximum of a thousand words, that began with that sentence...

'It was a dark and stormy night.'

It would be interesting to see how they dealt with the theme.

 

* American Book Review - No 22 in 100 best First Lines from Novels.


End file.
